Macha Concepts

Confirmation Gates

Definition

A confirmation gate is the pause Macha puts in front of any write action in interactive chat: before the agent sends a reply, updates a ticket, or issues a refund, it shows you exactly what it wants to do and waits for you to Confirm or Cancel.

Also known as: tool confirmationwrite confirmationapproval gate

How it works

Every connector and custom tool is typed read or write. Read tools (searching, looking things up) run automatically. Write tools mutate external state — a public reply, a status change, a refund — and always pause in interactive chat. The agent first announces the action in plain language ("I'm going to set ticket 4021 to urgent because…"), then shows a confirmation card with the exact parameters. Nothing customer-facing happens without your click.

The gate is a chat-mode safeguard. In autonomous mode, once a trigger fires the agent, writes execute immediately with no gate — which is precisely why Macha recommends testing an agent in chat before automating it, and why sub-agents stay read-only when their parent runs interactively.

Why it matters

Confirmation gates encode Macha's stance that a bad reply is worse than a slow one. They keep a human in the loop on anything that touches a customer while you're still building trust in an agent, and they pair with connector-level tool disabling for a second, platform-enforced layer of control.

Frequently asked

Do read-only actions need confirmation?

No. Fetching, searching, and looking things up run automatically. Only write actions — those that change something in a connected system — pause for your approval in chat.

Do confirmation gates apply to autonomous agents?

No. The gate exists only in interactive chat. A trigger-driven agent executes writes immediately, so you should test it in chat and scope its write tools carefully before automating it.

Chat & confirmations docs

Related terms

Human Handoff

Human handoff is Macha's principle of keeping a person in the loop on anything customer-facing — most concretely through confirmation gates that pause an agent before any write action in interactive chat, and escalation patterns that route hard cases to your team..

AI Guardrails

AI guardrails are the rules, checks, and constraints placed around an AI system to keep its behavior safe, on-topic, and within policy — controlling what it can say, do, and access..

Connectors

Connectors are Macha's built-in integrations.

Autonomous Agent

An autonomous agent is an AI system that pursues a goal on its own — deciding what steps to take, calling tools, and acting on the results — with little or no step-by-step human direction..

Put these ideas to work

Macha is an AI agent layer that sits on top of the help desk you already run — Zendesk, Freshdesk, Front, Intercom, or Gorgias.

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